For my first couple of years as a blogger, I was barraged with information about what the career online people, including bloggers, were doing. They had goals and purpose. They had widgets and conferences. They had tribes and elevator speeches. And I said “Me Too”! Although being a “make it my way” kinda gal, this didn’t make my purposeful process feel any easier as much as I hoped.

I was wowed when there were e-courses and email subscriptions I could pay for to beef me and my online stuff up. We could Build Platforms to shout out my purposeful branded stand so I could be in the ocean and swim with the big fish.

I did enroll in a few courses and enjoyed a few educational tools but I was still overwhelmed and continually unfulfilled. And as I looked at another e-course last year around the Holidays knowing we didn’t have the money, I said “Stop” ! There’s something up here.

“What was I really looking for ?” I asked myself. Because while I said I wanted to “find myself”, I suspected what I really wanted was someone to tell me what I was good at and to spell my life out for me. Tell me what to do. And that probably isn’t going to happen ever from anyone online or off.

It’s not up to “them” to find your purpose out for you and then dissuade you from taking their course. You need to dig deep and decide what you truly need to discover. If you discover that what they’re offering is the exact final piece to your puzzle, well then have at it. My gut told me that wasn’t happening with this course or any other then or ever.

Seems my life has been more about proving what I’m not than finding out what I am. So much energy spent reacting to others and seeking approval from others that I never truly knew myself. And I further suspect that, until I have permission to do so, I’m not allowed to find a purpose. And I suspect that this may be a problem many other women experience.

If we are raised by a society that asks us to be only caretakers, then we may completely dismiss our own desires as un-purposeful. Figuring out who we want to be may be the first thing we blow off in figuring out our life goals. This sounds selfish, superfluous, and silly because we don’t have permission to consider this. If we’re “good girls”, we do as we’re told and care-take the people with more reasonable purposes and dreams (our husbands). Or we care-take our helpless loved ones (our babies and our elders). Not that those aren’t noble purposes, they just might not have been chosen by us intentionally.

So then considering ones life’s purpose and goals is like jumping the shark. It makes no sense within the context of what we and our clans may expect of us. And if we do choose to head there and away from these expectations, we may need a lot of support and positive mirroring and permission to even consider this a possibility.

I can tell you that I’ve felt rather like a blind bird flailing about in a dark cage. As if I’m searching for the opening by using the Force. My intuition and what others have to say are often my guides to changing some of my first beliefs about myself from “Not enough” and “Can’t” to “Talented Girl with Purposeful Possibilities ahead”. And that this process of establishing purpose and identity takes as long as it takes. One step at a time.

If you missed it, I sussed out my Why in this recent post. And I think your Why is interchangeable with your Purpose. So what’s yours? And is the method by which you’re achieving an understanding of it satisfactory or frustrating? And is that because you are asking the wrong job to fulfill that purpose? And what if I had the power to say you could do what you really wanted to, what would you say/feel then?

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Shalagh and Fiona

About Me

My name is Shalagh Hogan, pronounced Shay-La. I'm the mother of a toddler, a tween, and my six year-old blog and I turned 51 this year. My hope and joy as a writer, an artist, and an uber-creative, is that by sharing my journey of self-discovery, others will gain inspiration and permission for their own journeys.

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